This invention relates to a technology of providing an application customized according to a flow of a task.
In recent years, the business environment has been changing drastically, and hence there arises a need to build an application promptly in response to the change. However, it is difficult to predict the change in the business environment prior to building an application. In view of this, there has been a demand that an application be changed promptly in response to the change in the business environment.
In a case where an application is changed with a conventional technology, a development project is first set up, and then led by an information system department or a system integrator who is specialized in building an application. For this reason, it has been difficult to change an application promptly in response to the change in the business environment.
In a case where the information system department or the system integrator changes an application, the application is built based on an opinion and a demand of a user who is actually to carry out the task. However, instead of from a viewpoint of the user who is actually to carry out the task, in some cases, the application is built from a viewpoint of the information system department or the system integrator, or from a viewpoint of a primary department responsible for conducting the final processing of the task. Hence, there occurs a case in which the user who is actually to carry out the task cannot use the application efficiently.
In view of such circumstances, there is proposed a technology in which, without relying on the information system department or the system integrator, the user who is actually to carry out the task changes the application promptly in response to the change in task and executes the application. A typical example of such a technology in which a user changes an application according to the purpose of a task includes mashup. The mashup is a method of creating a new application by associating information pieces provided by a plurality of different applications with one another. For example, an application that provides map information and an application that provides information on real estate properties are combined, whereby an application that provides a new real estate service is created.
In a conventional application changing method as typified by the mashup, a uniform resource locator (URL) that indicates the locational information of a window to be provided by an application is associated with customization defining information in which a change content of the application is described. The customization defining information is a file in which the URL of a window provided by an application to be changed and an application changing method are defined. The application changing method includes, for example, a method of adding information provided by a given application to a window of the application to be changed, and a method of adding a new processing program to the application to be changed. When a URL described in the customization defining information is accessed, an application that has been changed based on the customization defining information is executed.
A publicly-known example of the above-mentioned conventional customization methods is disclosed in, for example, JP 2005-505839 A. In JP 2005-505839 A, there is disclosed a technology in which change information previously associated with a user identifier is applied to response information and the resultant is provided to the user in a case where an access is made to the URL of a window provided by an application on a network.